If I’d closed my eyes, I might have confused John Hickenlooper with an IRS-baiting tax protester who had somehow slipped into a Denver Post editorial board meeting this week.

“The IRS — call it clever, call it however you like. A lot of people hate our government because of these tactics,” Hickenlooper declared. “They made a calculation of how much can we ask for so that the legal costs of battling it would be roughly equal to what they’re fighting over.

“The minimum cost to go to tax court is $60,000. What a coincidence! This is $52,000 [the amount the IRS demanded Hickenlooper pay for allegedly overvaluing conservation easements on land he owns in Park County]. Do you think that’s just an accidental coincidence? . . . Sure, probably just an accident.”

And when the mayor wasn’t directing sarcasm at the IRS, he was by turns bracing (“Why are we having this discussion?”) or indignant (“This is the most straightforward real estate deal I think I’ve ever been involved in”), or disdainful of news coverage (“We have been schooled so thoroughly by our friends in the media”).

If you didn’t know better, you’d have thought Hickenlooper was actually in a close race for governor and that recent revelations about his land deals were hurting his prospects. They aren’t, of course — nor should they, given the known facts surrounding the transactions. But his prickliness is misplaced on other grounds, too.

When the IRS questions an easement deal struck during an era in which abuses by landowners were so blatant and pervasive that they triggered legislation at the Capitol, that’s legitimate news.

What’s not legitimate, admittedly, is to conclude that just because the IRS smells smoke, we should assume an underlying fire. Hickenlooper points out that one year after the appraisal that the IRS later disputed — without even looking at other appraisals first, he maintains — he sold a piece of his Park County property for $7,500 an acre, or $1,500 more than the figure triggering the feds’ suspicions. The mayor says the IRS employed “some sort of computer program” to make a “mathematical adjustment” to targeted easement deals, and he paid up rather than resist.

If you’d been mayor of Denver, you’d probably have paid up, too, rather than welcome an ugly, public wrestling match with the IRS. That agency may not be the same rogue outfit that provoked Senate hearings in the 1990s and subsequent legislation to rein it in (as recounted in former Delaware Sen. William Roth’s book “The Power to Destroy”), but it is still known for overreaching and ham-fisted tactics.

And for stubbornness. Those who take on the IRS under such circumstances should brace themselves for a long legal slog.

What’s irritating about Hickenlooper’s easements are not the deals themselves but the way the mayor has portrayed his charitable donations. Giving up the right to develop something you never intended to develop, and earning a huge federal tax write-off in the process as well as state tax credits in excess of $100,000, is not most people’s idea of charity — whatever its technical classification.

And yet 40 percent of the mayor’s $2.7 million in contributions over the past 25 years involved the Park County conservation easements.

Hickenlooper has steadfastly refused to identify the other recipients of his generosity, leaving — until now — the impression that he donated $2.7 million of his actual earnings to worthy causes, some of which shunned publicity.

Yet Hickenlooper benefited mightily from those easements, whatever rights he gave up, too.

We still don’t know the identities of most recipients of Hickenlooper’s donations, except for the left-wing Chinook Fund. But it’s clear that the only publicity-shy participant in what may be the mayor’s most extensive set of contributions was not the recipient after all.

There’s been way more than enough written about Donald Trump’s battle with kneeling football players — especially with a major crisis underway in Puerto Rico — but one thing really does bother me that’s been revealed during this brouhaha: the extent to which many Americans have accepted the anti-democratic and false equivalence of patriotism and the military.